PACIFIC HESSIAN MONTHLY
by Eric Shea

A wise drunk once said that should you put a harmonica holster around a man's neck and prop an acoustic guitar under his arm to approximate an early Dylan look, you could sell that man to the world as a genius! And yet if you simply added a washboard to his stomach, some bicycle horns under his feet and strapped a bass drum to his back, that genius would be instantly transformed into an idiot. There is after all, a fine line between clever and stupid (to paraphrase another man).

Etienne de Rocher is a young man who has hammered out that fine line into the size a new country before seceding from the union. Not that he is a one-man-band…but he has been there and done that (sans idiocy). And he could do it again if some of the music community's most stellar players weren't lined up to help him conquer this gay and formidable planet we have come to know as Spaceship Earth (by gay, we simply mean lighthearted and fancy-free).

Unlike many of today's recording artists, Etienne has been able to do something that hardly happens in our current climate of deadlines, cocaine and medical pornography.
He has finished a recorded album.

The album is finished! Talk to anyone on any tier of the music world and they will tell you that yes, their product has a barcode on it, but no, it feels unfinished and they wish they could go back and change the way something sounds. Dude, not even George fucking Lucas was able to finish the first three Star Wars movies (or was that the second three?). That's why had to throw down all those anachronistic digi-puppets way after the fact for the "Special Edition" version of Star Wars.

Following an "it will be done when it sounds done" ethos, the album took a while to finish. De Rocher escaped to several highbrow and lowbrow recording studios with Fog City Records producer Dan Prothero, and enlisted Todd Roper (Cake’s founding drummer) and Todd Sickafoose (now playing bass with Ani DiFranco) among others. We’re not going to tell you how long the process took, because that’s almost as irrelevant as telling you about the time that a young and idealistic Etienne turned down a major label record deal

What we will tell you is the truth. The truth is that this one-sheet is a pretty shoddy bio compared to the words penned by the man himself. Should you want to get a better understanding of Etienne de Rocher's music and the album he was allowed to finish, just listen to the lyrics of the very first song on this disc. There's your fucking bio, Jordache.

     -Eric Shea

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